Frequent Miler’s 2011 Fails

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Frequent Miler has existed for only 4 months, so it’s a bit silly for me to produce a best and worst of 2011, but hey I’m on vacation so I don’t mind “phoning it in” as they say.  This will be a two part post.  In this post I’ll present my top failures of 2011 based upon my own subjective option.  So, without further ado, let’s start with the worst of Frequent Miler and I’ll follow-up with the best in a second post:

Frequent Miler Fails:

  1. How to meet credit card spend thresholds without breaking a sweat, How to buy points and miles for less than a penny.
    I’ve listed two posts here because they both had the same flaw. They relied on a technique of buying American Express gift cards through Big Crumbs and then liquidating the cards through a service called Square. Well, it turns out that Amex doesn’t like people to do this, and neither does Square. Both companies have frozen some people’s accounts for doing this. Yikes.
  2. Buy American Airlines Miles for less than 1.6 cents each.  No limit
    This one started out as a big win.  At the time, many people were anxious to build up their AA miles while they still counted towards million miler status.  Unfortunately, this trick relied on the Aadvantage e-Shopping Mall and the purchases of Sears gift cards.  To my knowledge, no-one who followed this lame advice received miles in time to count towards million miler status.  Worse, only one person has reported receiving miles at all and that was only after many months, many phone calls, and many emails.
  3. Post Christmas Cash
    In this post I reported that Monday, Dec 26th was “Gift Card Exchange Day” and that people would be able to sell their gift cards for more money than usual. Well, December 26th came and went with no discernable difference in trade-in values.
  4. Hacking Hawaii
    The goal was to show a couple who were not into credit card churning (or any other hacks) how easy it would be to take their family to Hawaii for very little money.  Unfortunately, even though I left out a number of hacks that would have made things cheaper, it was still too complicated and too much trouble for most people.
  5. Hacking Hawaii Revised
    I tried a second time here with a drastically simplified plan, but the end result was less than satisfactory.  Even though I love the title “Hacking Hawaii”, I decided it was time for me to hang it up after this one.
  6. Business Class Tickets to Australia, Cheap
    This one was actually one of my favorite posts.  I wrote it in anticipation of the Delta Skymall promotion in which they were giving away 25000 Delta Miles for purchases of $500 or more.  I got word that the promotion would open up late at night so I scheduled the post to appear early the next morning.  Well, when I woke up and checked my email I learned that the promotion did go live in the middle of the night, but it also ended in the middle of the night thanks to all of you night owls who placed 1000 qualifying orders!

So, did I nail the failures or do you want to suggest your own “worst of Frequent Miler” post?  Comment away!  And, have a great New Year’s Eve everyone!  On New Year’s day I’ll post the “best of”.  See you in 2012!

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